Musician taking instructions
Oct. 5th, 2004 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt's hard work, putting a play together. We're working daily from 10am to 7pm, with an hour off for lunch. It's the closest I've had in years to a day job. But it's much more expressive than most day jobs. Yesterday we went through Scene 12 of Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life about a dozen times. I sat with headphones, selecting music, while the actors did their collective call-and-response thing. I learned quickly that the music has to be very, very minimal. Simple drones work best, murky atmospherics which make a kind of sound broth into which you can drop the meat of the actors' speech.
After lunch comes the fun part; we play games, improvising scenes designed to enhance the cast's team spirit and help them improvise. First there are five 'tempos', and I'm asked to come up with pieces of music going from slow to fast, while the actors pace around the stage in that tempo. Then I'm free to find pieces of music which the actors are supposed to turn into improvised, wordless sketches. This is a bit like being a DJ, but instead of trying to make people 'dance', I'm making them dream up a whole scenario and play it out collectively. It's surprising to see what emerges: a piece by Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) conjures a silent drama in which an anguished woman, apparently being interviewed by psychiatrists or employers, is surrounded and collapses, wriggling away under the 'wall' like a cockroach. Some birdsong (field recordings, plus the quiet section of Cornelius Cardew's 'Great Learning', plus me playing along on a real decoy flute) produces a sketch in which ghosts console a bedridden Italian who seems to have seen Henry Fuseli's nightmare horse, and is clutching his head in horror. I keep trying to make the music more tender, to avoid these aggressive scenarios, but it's hard. I suppose that, just as the quickest and cheapest way to create tension in a film is to have a character produce a gun, so the easiest way to generate a compelling narrative when you're five actors on stage is to have a group versus an individual, and introduce some kind of menacing dynamic. I doubt that Japanese actors would come up with these scenarios, though. I'm already missing the harmonious collective-mindedness of Eastern societies. The actors produce a parody of this when I play Towa Tei's 'Pitamaha Bamboo', making (with quite astonishingly co-ordinated choreography, apparently without watching each other's moves) a little cameo of a tea ceremony. It's all very Gilbert and Sullivan, very exoticist, their picture of doll-like hostesses bowing with tidy, flirty gestures. But it makes a change from 'individual threatened by group' or 'man A menacing man B with violence, while woman A quarrels nearby with woman B'.
After each sketch there's a hilarious Show and Tell session in which the actors explain the stories they were acting out, and how they interpreted the gestures other people were making. It often turns out that everybody's been working at complete cross-purposes. 'I was the midwife, trying to help you deliver your baby.' 'No, I was being a grandmother, on her deathbed!'
This is hard work, but it's a reminder of how wonderful structured, guided play can be. I often think that people get bored by traditional entertainments -- clubs, pubs, concerts -- because there isn't enough structure in the things you do there. You drink, you dance, you talk, and that's 'leisure'. Its formlessness and 'freedom' make it banal and dull. Play needs structure, and structure needs a temporary hierarchy: a director and a cast. Plus a musician, taking instructions, for a change.
After lunch comes the fun part; we play games, improvising scenes designed to enhance the cast's team spirit and help them improvise. First there are five 'tempos', and I'm asked to come up with pieces of music going from slow to fast, while the actors pace around the stage in that tempo. Then I'm free to find pieces of music which the actors are supposed to turn into improvised, wordless sketches. This is a bit like being a DJ, but instead of trying to make people 'dance', I'm making them dream up a whole scenario and play it out collectively. It's surprising to see what emerges: a piece by Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) conjures a silent drama in which an anguished woman, apparently being interviewed by psychiatrists or employers, is surrounded and collapses, wriggling away under the 'wall' like a cockroach. Some birdsong (field recordings, plus the quiet section of Cornelius Cardew's 'Great Learning', plus me playing along on a real decoy flute) produces a sketch in which ghosts console a bedridden Italian who seems to have seen Henry Fuseli's nightmare horse, and is clutching his head in horror. I keep trying to make the music more tender, to avoid these aggressive scenarios, but it's hard. I suppose that, just as the quickest and cheapest way to create tension in a film is to have a character produce a gun, so the easiest way to generate a compelling narrative when you're five actors on stage is to have a group versus an individual, and introduce some kind of menacing dynamic. I doubt that Japanese actors would come up with these scenarios, though. I'm already missing the harmonious collective-mindedness of Eastern societies. The actors produce a parody of this when I play Towa Tei's 'Pitamaha Bamboo', making (with quite astonishingly co-ordinated choreography, apparently without watching each other's moves) a little cameo of a tea ceremony. It's all very Gilbert and Sullivan, very exoticist, their picture of doll-like hostesses bowing with tidy, flirty gestures. But it makes a change from 'individual threatened by group' or 'man A menacing man B with violence, while woman A quarrels nearby with woman B'.
After each sketch there's a hilarious Show and Tell session in which the actors explain the stories they were acting out, and how they interpreted the gestures other people were making. It often turns out that everybody's been working at complete cross-purposes. 'I was the midwife, trying to help you deliver your baby.' 'No, I was being a grandmother, on her deathbed!'
This is hard work, but it's a reminder of how wonderful structured, guided play can be. I often think that people get bored by traditional entertainments -- clubs, pubs, concerts -- because there isn't enough structure in the things you do there. You drink, you dance, you talk, and that's 'leisure'. Its formlessness and 'freedom' make it banal and dull. Play needs structure, and structure needs a temporary hierarchy: a director and a cast. Plus a musician, taking instructions, for a change.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-05 09:50 pm (UTC)but I may have chosen the wrong character..
off to school now, for the next rehearsal